The energy consumption of data centers (DCs) has dramatically increased in recent years, primarily because of the massive computing demands driven essentially by every sector of the economy, ranging from accelerating online sales in the retail business to banking services in the financial industry. A study estimated the total U.S. DC energy consumption in the year 2005 to be approximately 1.2% of the total U.S. consumption (up by 15% from the year 2000). See, for example, J. G. Koomey, “Estimating Total Power Consumption by Servers in the U.S. and the World, A report by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Feb. 15, 2007; and “EPA Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency” Public Law 109-431, United States Code, Aug. 2, 2007.
In an effort to improve data center energy efficiency the Green Grid Organization has introduced metrics, which assist data center operators in gauging the energy efficiency of the facility. For example, the Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency (DCIE) metric is defined as the ratio between the energy consumption for all IT equipment of the DC facility and the total DC energy usage. An equivalent metric is the one called the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) (with PUE=1/DCIE). The DCIE or PUE metric are today widely used by DC operators. The DCIE and PUE metrics are described, for example, in C. Belady et al., “Green grid data center power efficiency metrics: PUE and DCIE,” Green Grid White Paper #6 (2008), the contents of which are incorporated by reference herein.
While it is important to measure data center energy efficiency, techniques for determining what DCIE or PUE value is actually achievable would be useful given the fact that each data center is different with very different requirements (different business requirements, IT equipment mix, geographical locations, technology pre-requisites, etc.).